From ‘Poetics’ to ‘Production’: Genres as Active Ingredients in Media Production

Abstract

All media production happens within ‘genre-specific worlds’ (Tunstall, 1993: 201). Most of the discourses that float in and around production worlds—whether aesthetic and ethical or economic and managerial—in fact belong to genres (Bruun, 2011, 2010; Dornfeld, 1998: 91). Genres are thus an emic conceptual force with which production studies must reckon. Most current sociological studies, however, either completely disregard genres or treat them conveniently as outcomes of production and utilitarian labels by which managers, directors and marketers label and promote classes of cultural products as ‘genres’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1994). Yet by treating genres merely as imposed classification systems that link producers and audiences on the market, we preclude the possibility of enriching the analytical repertoire of production studies with a category that possesses structural, formal and ontological autonomy. In this way we forfeit a potentially nuanced and comprehensive understanding of how producers work in practice in genre-based production worlds, cope daily with workplace anxieties, and forge professional identities as genre-specialists.